I have an MP4 video that I took with a Flip camera. The camera froze up while I was stopping the recorder and now the video appears corrupt. I can still download it off the camera, but it won’t play. Now, the video is still over 2 Gigabytes in size, so I think the data is still there.

So, I scoured the web looking for solutions, and I found paid services and software that claim to be able to fix such a thing. One diagnostic service (“Treasured”), showed me stills from the video, confirming my believe that there probably is something salvageable there. Unfortunately, though, the price requested to fix it is not in the budget. It requires more of a homespun solution.

Does anyone know how to fix a corrupted MP4? Or of a service or software that is not too much money?

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3 Answers
3

give this a shot
Official tool Link
This utility can recover H.264/AVC stream from unfinalized MP4/MOV files
without (or empty) header. You may got the unfinalized file in case of damaging
camcorder during recording or such. This utility has been tested with files
recorded by GoPro, but it may work with other camcorders too.

Thanks for your insights on this. I will try it out when time permits. :)
– Steve C.Sep 10 '14 at 13:32

Worked Brilliant, Thanks! I was a bit concerned at first about downloading via the direct link but noticed other sites did the same. Usage: recover_mp4_to_h264.exe in_good_similar.mp4 --avcc recover_mp4_to_h264.exe bad.mp4 out_video.h264 out_audio.aac
– Wayne ShelleyDec 28 '14 at 17:21

yea sorry about the link, it gets stripped from other sites so it's just easier to host on mega
– AndrewApr 6 '15 at 18:02

I had my android phone crash whilst i was filming. Luckily it's rooted so i could retrieve the temporary file from the Camera folder.

It was easy to recover the material using the advice here, it got me well on the way.
But there were a few difficulties to conquer concerning the merge of the files...

The recovered audio had a higher bitrate than audio from 'good' files. 128k instead of 96k. So I could merge the files back into a working movie, but audio would go too fast and lose sync. So it needed conversion.

Also ffmpeg couldn't/wouldn't copy the aac stream, so it needed to convert the stream with a filter;aac_adtstoasc

It's important to note that, for it to work, you must provide a non-broken (playable) movie of the same type (recorded using the same camera, with the same resolution, same settings, etc), so the software can compare that playable video file with the broken one and repair it. If you don't have a sample already, it's enough to record a 10 seconds video of your room or anything else using the same settings that you used to record the file which ended up broken.